Taking on Cyber Racism

A new project aims to give culturally and linguistically diverse people an outlet to report cyber bullying and abuse.

The project launched by the Online Hate Prevention Institute in November 2014, involves a close collaboration with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and the Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (FECCA).

The Online Hate Prevention Institute is a charity with the vision “to change online culture so hate in all its forms becomes as socially unacceptable online as it is ‘in real life’.” It does this through advocacy and providing information and research articles on the issue of cyber bullying and racism.

Dini Liyanarachchi is a Project and Policy Officer at FECCA, the organisation that helped to launch and support the website. She has first hand experience as a migrant in Australia, relocating here from Sri Lanka in 2014.

Working along side the Youth Advisory Committee she said that racism is an ongoing problem in Australia.

“Its not just your race or your skin colour, I personally have issues with people understanding my accent… If that person can’t understand me, that person gets agitated and annoyed which was hard for me” she said.

This racism is now being pushed into our increasingly online society and The Online Hate Prevention Institute has looked at how online media outlets are also contributing to the problem.

“After the Charli Hebdo incident they did a piece on all media and how media handled it and how it sort of created a fear of all Muslims. It was also just around the Sydney incident so they tried to connect the two and look at how media is making a sensation out of it and putting the Muslims in a dangerous position,” Liyanarachchi said.

Along with media outlets, racism is prevalent on social media including websites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. These can be used as an easy medium to spread hate and discrimination amongst communities.

Part of this project includes an online toolkit called Fight Against Hate.  Liyanarachchi explains that it allows people to “complain or lodge complaints about the instances where they see something abusive. And how to identify whether it’s abusive or whether it’s discriminative because somethings are borderline. ”

Once you have registered for an account on the website you can also interact with others and discuss and evaluate content that has been reported as abusive or discriminative.

Australia is a multicultural society and with most people on some form of social media, this project aims to help tackle a problem that has reached the online sphere.

Liyanarachchi hopes this will be a returning project with plans to get first hand stories from individuals who have experienced cyber racism.

Written by Anja Kokkonen